The Very Best of Barry N Malzberg

by Barry N. Malzberg

  You know it, right? There’s really nothing I have to say here. We went straight to the Days Inn and we did it at day rates, after all those years I had known her I could at last have her as I had not imagined possible. It was remarkable. I have cheated a little over the years of my marriage like everyone else but there had never been anything like this for me. We heaved and rammed and squeaked and screamed all over the room and almost through the walls beyond. The wallpaper was patterned. I felt I was going to drive her right through that wallpaper and me on top of her and that was just the first time.

  After that there were plenty of times. She said that David had made her feel that she wasn’t a woman, he had taken the womanhood from her, but she was getting it back from me piece by piece. I don’t have to tell you what I got from her.

  Sometimes things just happen, you know? They happen and you understand that your whole life up to then had been a lie …but there is no way, just no way you can ever tell that to anyone or for a long time even to yourself. I called it doing therapy for Dorothy and joked to myself about that. I just didn’t want to let myself know.

  After a while though I came to admit what I already understood and stopped fighting the truth of the situation.

  So that’s really almost all of it, Chambers said after another long pause. We tend to pause a lot at Men’s Support Group. It has to do with the highly charged nature of the material discussed. There is a little more, of course. David got AIDS, he told Dorothy that he had been positive for a long time and then the Kaposi’s showed like a delayed houseguest. So Dorothy panicked and screamed and had the test and she turned out to be positive.

  She told me all this after the fact, a week after the test. I’m positive, she said. You’d better get tested fast. You’d better take a look at the situation. It’s never two in a bed anymore, she said, don’t you know that now? It is three or four or maybe forty. He gave me AIDS, the son of a bitch, she said. I should have known but I didn’t and I didn’t want to face it. It’s not AIDS, I said. It’s just a positive.

  She slapped me. Never had a woman do that, not ever. You son of a bitch, she said. Drop dead you bastard but first get the test and tell your wife if you have any heart at all. Then drop dead. Then she left me. This was in a large open-air restaurant, al fresco, they call it I guess, right? Left me flat as little kids say. A thirty-two dollar bill for two drinks each and one lousy order of guacamole and a positive diagnosis. And if you have anything to say don’t say it to me, she said. It’s done.

  That’s almost all of it, Chambers said. I should say that all through this I had kept up appearances with David, he was my best friend still after all and we had plenty to talk about, confessional stuff, although he had never told me about the Kaposi, or for that matter even the positive. Back end in is sometimes the only way. I was learning. I wasn’t sure why Dorothy was so mad at me, I wasn’t the guy who had given her the disease after all, who had lied to her for years and dreamed of men to keep it up, but there is no accounting for misdirection and the horror of choice, is there?

  Anyway, he said, I had the test and that is the story.

  We looked at him in the requisite silence for a while.

  Well, that’s it, Chambers said, you want an epilogue, is that it? You want more? Don’t you understand that the axis of the story isn’t: Does he have a positive? Did he give it to his wife? That isn’t where the story is centered.

  No, this is the point: everything has consequence, nothing is disconnected any more, we must pay and pay and there is a causality which makes no discrimination for possibility.

  So, anyway, then, all right: I turned up positive and they did it again because false positives are common or at least that’s what I wanted to believe. It was positive again. So that was that and I told my wife. Gloria, that’s my wife. It wasn’t easy but sometimes you just have to come out with something.

  Gloria, I said, I am HIV positive, do you know what that means? I’m sorry but that is the situation. I had the test just as soon as I had reason to believe exposure and I am giving you the results immediately.

  I mean, Chambers said, how do you tell someone something like this? It’s not like saying you lost your job or they caught you embezzling. This is why I say that everything is connected now. Was that the way your guy Fred felt when he put down the phone with the death call and looked at his wife?

  How do you say welcome to the abattoir? Gloria, that’s it, I said. That’s it and that’s it and there’s no way around this. You want ethos, I’ll give you ethos and angst and betrayal and broken troths later on but right now I’m just telling you a situation. I am HIV positive. You may be. You have to get tested at once.

  I’ve been tested, she said. I don’t need a test.

  Well, that got my attention I will tell you. There was a lot of staring, just as lush and round our eyes as you gentleman are giving me. You got tested? I said. What for? What does this mean?

  It means exactly what you think, she said. Exactly that. And I am positive. I’ve been positive for over a year. Just as you’ve been giving it to Dorothy you see and I knew what that little trick was doing, I’ve been getting it on with David.

  All right? she said. He seems to go both ways, so why are you so surprised? Two ways is two ways and we’re all old friends here, aren’t we? Sharing our lives.

  I thought about telling you, she said. I thought about how we passed this thing back and forth like a beach ball. I thought about it but what would the difference have been? And then I thought: what if there is someone else, someone new in this, someone I don’t know? What about her? Or what about him? Who knows? Who tells? Who cares?

  Not me, stupid, she said, looking right my way. I don’t care at all. For you, for myself, anybody. If you were screwing around on the side with someone out of the circle then he or she has got it too and I’m sorry but I still don’t care. I certainly had better luck with him than with you, you lying, distracted son of a bitch. So that’s why I decided not to tell. Not that I was getting plenty anyway.

  We’re all going to die, I said. Gloria, we’re all going to die.

  You fool, she said. We’re already dead. We’ve been dead for years.

  That’s all, Chambers said. If there’s any more I missed it. All right. This was two weeks ago. I haven’t fucked a soul since, but I seem to still be living at home. Finances, you know.

  We’ve been dead for years, Chambers said, but there’s till the issue of

  money, beyond all epiphany, don’t you think?

  We sat there for a while and thought about it.

  Still thinking.

  Out from Ganymede

  I

  SETTLING into orbit around what he has decided to call the Mad Satellite (nothing personal but the mission itself is insane, so tough on Ganymede), Walker finds himself thinking of his estranged wife: unquestionably she was a terrific fuck. Often after he had emptied himself into her as the culmination of simply hours and hours of heaving, bucking, moaning perversity, she had fluttered her eyes underneath and invited him with a coy yank of her head, letting him know that, for everything he had done, the essential part of her lay untouched. How it had infuriated him! He thought that she had been subtly insulting his adequacy when all the time he failed to see the plea beneath the insouciance. The woman had been insatiable. He never should have left her. Still there were other things, other reasons; nothing is as simple as it seems and sexuality is only a metaphor. He comforts himself with this as he works on controls, does computations, juggles the ship into a tight circuit. Deprivation and tension turn the mind in strange ways; he has never really regretted leaving her. He concentrates on Ganymede, which hangs below him darkly, aspects of rock filtering through the cloud formation, the gas of Jupiter high behind him in the anterior port. It is really a great little moon, very Earthlike in its gravity and appearance, to say nothing of being the gateway to Jupiter.

  Base, which has talked him into the orbit, asks Walker how he is coming along.
Walker says that everything is fine, fine; he had merely been preoccupied for a few moments setting up the orbit on the computer and had dropped out of contact. “That’s nonsense, kid,” Base says, “everything is plotted right here, you know that. Don’t let all that space get to you now. Keep organized.”

  “It isn’t easy, you know,” Walker points out. He does not have to address a microphone, the whole craft being wired for sound in such a way that even the sounds of his evacuation can be evaluated by medical personnel at Base. “I mean, it’s difficult to carry on as if this was strictly routine. You could try a little understanding.”

  Base points out that it has cost billions of dollars to put Walker in orbit around Ganymede, that the security and importance of the project cannot be risked because of personal quirks and that nothing must get in the way of the successful completion of the mission. It advises Walker to shape up and reminds him that there is a broadcast due in some twenty minutes, audio and video. Therefore, Base adds rather petulantly, it would make sense to get the cabin in order and put all debris out of visual range. The question of the apogee can be left to the computer.

  “The hell with that,” Walker says but he says this subvocally and with his face turned toward the floor. Not that the floor does not have pickups also.

  II

  Walker has been selected for the Ganymede project since he is the fittest of the twenty astronauts left in the program. This says little for his competence — fifty years ago there were several hundred and Walker would have barely qualified for steward’s duty — but the agency has been in decline for a long time and, relative to the present situation, Walker is about the best that they can get. He reminded them of this during the examinations, at the physical and at the final briefing but it hardly seems to have done him much good. There is a certain failure of respect. “You are but a piece in the machinery,” they had warned him but he had been in no mood to accept that until he was on his way. Now the situation has changed; recently he has been feeling very much like an engine with a certain pistonlike creaking or hammering beneath the joints. Also his voice seems to have become somewhat metallic and his mind moves with the convulsions of slow gears. He does not want to be a machine, not particularly, but then again he understands the agency very well and is willing to agree that the alternatives might have been worse.

  Walker has not had sex for several months and then in an inept performance with his estranged wife, who told him that she would do it once for the memories and then, limbs spread, regarded him with cold ferocity as he worked against her. Several times he has considered covert masturbation within the ship but even during the sleep periods they surely have ultraviolet light and would be able to detect everything that he was doing. Besides, there seems to be something ridiculous in the idea of a man carried past Mars twirling his genitals. Something mystical should happen to a man past the moon to drive him past need. Masturbation had never been part of the briefing process for reasons he now thinks he understands.

  III

  After he superficially cleans the cabin there is a five-or ten-minute dead space before the broadcast during which he has little to occupy him and he sits, looking at the walls of the cabin, admiring certain notations the agency has put up in bulletin forms, with absolutely no interest in turning rearward and looking at Ganymede. This way is much better; he can believe that he is only on another simulation. During this period, the aliens come to him. There are two of them, strange yellow bipeds with glowing eyes who wear archaic clothing. On their chests is stenciled Ganymede Police and they carry weapons in their appendages which look rather menacing. “Stay calm,” one of them says to him, “we just want to talk.”

  ‘’I’m perfectly calm,” Walker says. They are the first living beings he has seen for twelve days and fourteen hours and, despite their dangerous appearance, he is rather glad to see them. Excellent training has long since made him matter-of-fact in relation to all challenge. “As you can see, I’m not too busy at the minute. I am due for a transmission soon, though, and I’m afraid that I’ll have to make it.”

  “That’s fine,” the spokesman says. He shrugs and replaces his weapon inside his clothing. “I’ll do the talking, the other one is just along verifying. The next time he’ll do the talking. We work in shifts that way, it’s much easier.”

  “I can understand that,” Walker says. “But how did you get into the cabin?”

  The alien shrugs again, this time with a rather coy tilt of his appendages which marks him instantly to Walker (who has been well trained) as a cunning article. “Dematerialization” he says. “Don’t think about it too much. We want to take up with you this issue of invading our planet. Ganymede is sovereign territory, you know, and you just can’t settle into orbit that way. Furthermore, you’ve got enough armament on this ship to sink a planet. Exactly what do you have in mind?”

  “Oh,” Walker says, “I knew that there would be trouble about that. The armament is just for show. There’s no intention of using it.” He blushes faintly. “I wouldn’t even know how to make it work,” he says. ‘’I’m not sure that it does work. They don’t bother me with things like that from the ground.”

  “Nevertheless,” the alien says, “nevertheless, I’m afraid that you people simply didn’t consider the situation. You’re dealing with free territory here. You have absolutely no right in orbit and you must agree that if the situation were reversed you’d find it pretty frightening. You’re going to have to leave.”

  “Well, how the hell did we know Ganymede was inhabited?” Walker says, trying to be reasonable. “There wasn’t any sign at all. It’s just a dead moon. How do I know that you people even are from Ganymede?”

  “We’re not people,” the alien says, “nevertheless I . understand your terminology. I’m afraid that you’re not being very reasonable about the matter. We’re giving you two hours, your time, to turn around and go back to your planet, otherwise we will have to take retaliatory action. I don’t want to be more specific than that.”

  “You don’t understand,” Walker says. “1 can’t make any decisions like that. I can’t even make promises. I’m just an engineer sent along for the ride. I have no authority.”

  “That,” the alien says, “is your problem.” He nods at his companion, his companion gives a brusque strained nod at Walker, they huddle together and at some prearranged signal vanish. Walker is left in the cabin sniffing a faint aroma of ozone which they seem to have left behind them. Base comes on and says that it is time for the transmission to begin. Walker asks them if they heard what just went on and Base says that they have had no time to monitor, they are very busy down there, does Walker really think the first transmission from Ganymede is routine business and they will replay the tapes at their leisure sometime when they get around to it. Everything going on inside the cabin is part of the perfectly preserved public record.

  IV

  Walker delivers a speech to the assembled peoples of Earth. He reads it slowly, precisely, off the prompter they have installed out of range of the camera, the words unreeling rather majestically. Someone in the higher echelons of the information division has a dash of eloquence although perhaps he is merely thinking of the top levels of the government; it is impossible to tell precisely who is guiding the mission. Walker reminds the people of Earth that in a time of torment and trouble mankind has historically looked toward the heavens from which heavens judgment and a sense of purpose have always come and that it is the spirit of the stars no less than that of the Earth which makes mankind human. By going to Ganymede as we have, by this rare act of disciplined courage on the part of thousands of dedicated people of whom he is only the most visible, Earth has been given a beacon, an instrument of its purpose. “We did not, after all, travel all this vast distance in the ether only to repeat the small banalities of our mistakes, we are refreshed and renewed by our glimpse of the void,” Walker says, thinking vaguely about the machinery of the agency compound and how, at the checkpoints on the
few occasions when he had had to leave the Base, he had seen thousands of people behind the barricades staring at him and mumbling. What the hell were they saying? Exactly what brought them there? Walker wonders as he goes on to recite some technical data; Ganymede is the largest satellite of the planet Jupiter, it was discovered by an Italian scientist in the seventeenth cenrury; of all the satellites of the planets it is the most Earthlike in appearance and atmosphere, more habitable than Venus, and may eventually be the only place in the solar system where men will be able to maintain a colony independent of the home planet. He turns the camera so that the audience, with him, can see the terrain five hundred miles beyond, swimming in gases, and then turns it back to the cabin, advising them that he will be transmitting three more times during his orbits of Ganymede and hopes that all men of faith and will can join him in the mission. The speech runs out but the transmission, judging from clicks and winks, apparently does not; he fills an embarrassed ten seconds with greetings to his wife and parents and then the light goes out and Base tells them that he has done very well, that everything is in excellent shape, that he should rest for the next cycle in preparation for his next broadcast.

  “Yes,” he says, ‘’but are they listening?” “We have a full hookup, right through the satellites,” Base says. “1 would think that four billion heard you just now.”

  “Ah yes,” Walker says, ‘’but did they attend?” He feels lightheaded, slightly disconnected. “And about those aliens; I want to tell you about the aliens.”

  “No time,” Base says. “Rest cycle must begin now and you’re slipping out of range.”

  “But look,” Walker says, “you’re not following me. Just before the transmission I was visited by these two aliens from Ganymede and they said — ”

  “No time,” Base says, “we’ll pick it all up on the monitors.”